Owner's Thread: Dell Inspiron 7000 series

Hello, simple question to those who know:
I'm going to order a new harddrive today for the Dell 15 7537
I want to order this one: click

I've wayed the pro's and cons for SSHD versus SSD, but for me the 'noise' the harddrive makes is not bothersome (as in, I hardly ever hear it). The SSHD is really fast in benchmarks and simply fast enough, and the price difference between a 750GB/1TB SSD and this SSHD is simply to big (I could buy three SSHD's for the same price).

Question however, does it fit? Cause I have no idea:
Size (WxHxD)
70 x 9.5 x 101 mm

 

My 7537 died unexpectedly this morning!

I had my second screen replacement last week - the engineer came out to replace the installed-by-error non-touch 1080 screen with a touch enabled 1080 screen - All went well. (BTW - the touch enable 1080 screen was / is much better quality than the non-touch equivalent).

I spent last night using the laptop for about 4 hours, before powering down and getting some sleep. Woke up this morning, hit the power button and nothing. Have tried removing the battery, discharging static, mains only, but nothing. Its dead!

Hopefully Dell will replace quickly, otherwise I might have to send this back for a refund.

 

wow, that is scary. Hopefully it has something to do with software instead of hardware.

 

Hey Paul,

Thanks!

Worked.

 

I'm about to buy a 7537 myself, however I am a bit confused with upgrading the hdd. I already have an ssd, which I wish to put instead of the standard 1TB hdd that comes with the laptop. I know somebody mentioned a few pages back that customer chat told him it's ok (warranty will not be voided). I had the same chat myself, however they told me that I can only upgrade it with dell parts in order not to void the warranty. Now I am a bit confused on what to do.

 

cool good to hear that.
Not sure about the warranty thing but I think my machine is running beautifully now so I don't think I will ever contact them for something until my next upgrade in prob 3 - 4 yrs, hopefully (depends on my finance and innovation rate)

 

You are allowed to replace all "servicable parts" but if you need service for the computer you will need to reinsall the original parts that the computer came with before sending it to them.

Servicable parts are ram, drive and wi-fi card

 

Thanks. Looking forward to getting mine.
A dell rep said I should receive it by 7th of December, but I just received the confirmation note and the estimated delivery is 10th. I hope it doesn't get even more delayed

 

Should I buy this laptop from dell.com or best buy...which would be more reliable?

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

 

I bought it from bestbuy because i didn't want to wait for 2 weeks to get my lap and it is cheaper in bestbuy too. I also got 50 bucks off from student discount so I saved about 110 bucks compared to buying from Dell. Repair and replacement is also easier from Bestbuy. They are super nice if you want to do that.

 

I am only getting about 70 dollars off (student discount and 20 off)...how did you get 110 off?

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

 

well I bought it in a Best Buy store in Delaware which was tax-free so that bumped up my savings up to $110. But $70 bucks is still a good deal, though. The only downside form getting it form Best Buy is that you only have 2 options for the base and the full HD without nvidia.

 

Anyone know if this laptop supports WIDI?

 

It does

Can ayone answer about this:

 

this is the dimension of the SSD I'm using 3.9 x 2.8 x 0.3 inches (99.06mm x 71.12mm x 7.62mm) but I have to put it in the tray to fit in the HDD slot.
Edit: update on battery: seems like every time I charge it to full, the battery wears out .1%. Not much but still, it is happeninggggg!

 

Regarding the question about HDD physical dimensions --

The HDD that came in my purchased from Best Buy Model 7537 is the

Seagate ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB.

You can find the specs (including size) on this data sheet on the Seagate site:

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/.../spinpoint-m-series/en-us/spinpoint-m8-ds.pdf

Regards

 

The engineer came again today. 3rd visit in a month, we're now on first name terms... He replaced the whole motherboard but still wasn't able to get the laptop working. He's coming back on Monday to replace the power switch and power connector.

I love this laptop when it works, but this is poor.

 

Wouldn't it jut be simpler for them to give you a new machine at this point?... Replacing the motherboard should be like the last resort.

 

hello

I'm planning to but the 7537 (15") and would like to replace the original HDD with an SSD. I can have an SSD which is 9.5mm high and I wonder if it will fit given that most of SSDs for laptops are 7mm (and also it seems that the 7537s sold with SSDs are 7mm high). Has anyone here tried it? It seems that the original HDD is also 9.5mm (as per mgj167) so I would think it's ok but I would appreciate if anyone could answer. What about the tray then, would I need one? Thanks!

 

i don't think it will, the slot is pretty tight and the cover is right on top of it so any difference in thickness might cause an issue.

 

Do you have an SSD yourself, if so how high is it? If not how high is your HDD? Cheers

 

hi

can you please let me know if everybody has a problem with the space key? How often does it miss it?

 

yeah I have the 840 Evo and it's .3in thick. Also someone posted the HDD used in this product so you can also look that up. And I don't have any prob with the space bar key at all. I don't constantly press right in the middle either so mine works perfectly

 

hello,

can i have some help as to how to adjust the laptop to use the discrete graphics instead of the integrated graphics?
thanks

 

I'm planning to buy the dell 15 7000 with hdd, can i rzplace it with the samsung s 840 pro 256go (ssd) ?

 

I have it. I posted a small test to see if it can be temporarily resolved a few pages back. The left side of the spacebar is harder to press then the right side.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

I had a similar thing just happen with a brand new Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD. Laptop was fine for a day but the next day didn't come up after a reboot (No boot device found) and after booting with original Dell HDD I found the SSD was unallocated. I then reinstalled everything from scratch and 2 days later the same thing happened. After the second time I've returned the SSD under warranty for a replacement and are awaiting their response. I see from other posts Macgyver88 had his one fail when doing an advanced startup so perhaps it's some other issue with the Laptop/Dell drivers rather than the SSD.

Anyone else had this happen?

 

So I received my Inspiron 15 7000 Series today. I'm liking it so far apart from a few complaints...

- The keyboard, overall. The keys need more force than they seem like they should and I'm missing far more keys than I usually do. Also, one of my keys is discolored and the backlighting on the keyboard is very spotty. The spacebar for example seems to have three lights that are out that should be there, and about a quarter of the other keys seem to only be partially lit.

- Noise. Though the laptop is silent for the majority of the time, when the fan spins up it is incredibly noisy. Even the Y510p with a quad core processor was quieter when the fan spun up.

- Heat. The laptop itself stays cool, but the processor is hitting 82C when playing a game. Considering the amount of noise the fan is throwing off and the fact that it's a ULV processor I expected better.


And one oddity... despite being a model with the GT 750m, my laptop arrived with no Nvidia drivers installed. The latest Intel were there, but nothing from Nvidia.

 

I've got the 17" Dell Inspiron 7000 (7737). Right out of the box the CPU usage is almost always 100%. The system process takes up 30-70% most of the time and machine is pretty sluggish. System Interrupts is always around 12% but can jump higher. As a comparison I've got a 3.5 year old Dell that I've upgraded to Windows 8.1 and it idles at around 7% even with 30 odd tabs open and 10 -15 apps running along with the background services etc. I've talked to Dell twice and run some of the Dell tests which come back normal. One of the call takers said that CPU on idle should be under 50% but I think it should be under 10%. I've even tried doing a factory reset and it's the same. I wonder why Dell would ship their Driver/OS configuration with obviously something wrong with the drivers.

I had disabled McAfee and Windows defender and sometimes it will rest down around 80% CPU. Fan is on the whole time. I have not yet installed any new applications. Battery lasts just over an hour but I saw reviews which said they got over 5 hours when actually doing stuff.

I've upgraded to Win8.1 and the 8.1 Dell drivers as well to see if that improves things and that actually runs even more sluggishly I think. Can someone with the same type of machine please tell me what their idle CPU is? Once I have this I can get back on to Dell support to see if I can return the machine if indeed my one is performing much worse than the others. I've had a bit of a bad run as in a previous post I mentioned that I had also wanted to put in a Samsung SSD and had the drive fail and become unbootable and unallocated twice in just 3 days.

 

Yes, you can.

 

Try disabling Search Indexing in Windows. It takes up a lot of background processing, especially when the computer is plugged in. It'll improve battery life considerably. Indexing is a good idea in theory, but it has its issues, especially with indexing XML files and the like. You actually get around an hour longer battery life (speaking from experience).

 

which browser are you guys using? I tried firefox, IE, and am using Safari right now but each has its own weakness: firefox is laggy as hell when I open more than 1 tabs, IE (are you kidding?), and safari doesn't let me open a new tab so everytime I have to right click and open a new windows. I've heard google chrome usually crashes and uses lots of resources. Arghhhhhhhhhhhhh
Edit: i'm gonna stick to safari for the moment

 

I would really recommend against Safari on Windows. Apple dropped support for it over a year ago so you aren't receiving any security updates.

The latest IE is actually pretty decent and will give you the bet power usage of any of the browsers on Windows currently. Chrome is fine, I'm not sure where you've heard that it crashes. And Firefox on the Inspiron runs fine with multiple tabs...

 

Hi guys I'm buying the laptop and I am planning to replace the HDD with a SSD. What screwdriver will I require to open the bottom panel and the HDD. Are they both Philips screws? Also what cloning software can be used to clone the recovery portion as the samsung software does not?

 

U're absolutely right. Safari on windows is just not right, feels like apple wannabe. I got back to Aurora this time, it's beta but very stable and smooth unlike firefox.

 

I've just tried that and it makes not noticeable difference. Presumably the service wasn't really running anyway since there is no CPU available for it. What is your idle CPU? I'm thinking I'm going to need to return it. It's so slow it's almost unusable and this is before I install any programs I need for work.

 

I am watching a movie and one tab open, the CPU is at around 12% to 30%

 

Anyone in Europe knows how tracking number works?

Dell gave me a Traking starting with JJD00000... and it seems its for DHL, but it doesn't work in any DHL website. On my status page in Dell, it links to an AX4 site, wich haven't changed anything since the day they shipped my Inspiron, last Tuesday.

 

OK - so clearly I have a serious issue. I just went through device manager and disabled almost every driver I could and stopped most services and I can get the average CPU usage to drop to 90%. It's much more responsive now having the 10% CPU left but the fan is working hard and so the underlying issue must still be there. Changing tabs in Task manager for example now takes about a second instead of 5 seconds. I've emailed Dell support and will see if I can get this laptop swapped out. Thanks.

 

Just out of interest Paul Thuong - what Bios version are you running? I see from the Intel Extreme Tuning utility I'm running A05 yet for my 17" Dell they don't have this one available for download and only have the A04. So perhaps the A05 is buggy and they've pulled it. I could try and downgrade to A04 if that's possible and see if that helps.

 

I have A05 so that's not the issue. I disabled touchscreen and wifi, FYI.

I also attached a list of stuff I have when starting up

 

Hello,

I posted a similar message in the Inspiron 7000 14" thread but I'll try here as well because this thread covers all Inspiron 7000.
My 14" unit does have some warping on the panel that doesn't make it flush when I close it. It's not as bad as it looks and I don't think I'll bother exchanging it since I believe I might not get a better unit (factory tolerances perhaps?) but I'd still like to get your feedback on yours. Picture below. Thanks!

View attachment 105617

 

Oh and something else...
Have any of you encountered that error from QuickSet where it says "battery encountered a permanent failure". In the control panel, it says the battery is operating normally but I'm a bit skeptcal.

I have a 7000 14" (Core i7-4500, FHD display if it changes anything) + upgraded to Windows 8.1 with all driver updates from Dell.

 

Mine came with A05 as well, I'm not experiencing the issue you describe (it's 15" though, I thought this thread was only for that model 7537)

However not that when you run in power save mode your CPU will be stuck at 0.8 GHz it wont go higher unless you pick another plan.

Anyways you should be able to see what the issue is in the Task Manager.

 

Hi,

I did a search in the thread, but the keyword 'linux' gave no result.

Would have someone tested a linux distro on the inspiron 15 ?

 

I thought the thread was pretty generic as the title is only the 7000 series. I'm running in the Dell power mode and CPU is not stuck at low GHz. Offending task is the System task (and System Interrupt) so it's not just a simple kill task to fix solution. System often gets above 50%.
It's not because of something I've installed as this issue is still there after complete factory reset - the laptop was shipped in this condition....

 

Thanks for those screen shots. My service list is pretty much the same as far as I can tell. However your CPU usage screen shot is what I would have expected from a new laptop. Here's mine attached at idle. I've installed Skype but that is it for new programs. (It did not make a difference in terms of CPU). As you can see at idle it's almost all the System and System interrupt process. FYI the Bios A05 is not downloadable for the 17" Inspiron so it's possible it's not the same as for the others in the series. THat's why I wonder if they've found issues and not been able to release it for the 17" even though mine shipped with it. I tried to downgrade to A04 but this fails after file extraction and the command prompt error is so fleeting I can't see what it says. But probably it's saying you can't install an older BIOS version over a newer one I would suspect.

 

what are those system and system interrupt things going on there? That's pretty intense.
Anyway, just wanna tell you my recent experience with Dell customer service. So I chatted with a dell technician lately and I mentioned about the screen bleeding issue to test if they knew one or two thing. So the tech told me to take a picture of the screen when it was dark which I did. And he was like: okay we will send someone to replace the panel for you. I also asked him about the touchpad being slightly moved to the left aka not evenly placed. and he also offered to replace that for me too. He just called to inform that the panel would arrive tomorrow and someone would call me to schedule the replacement. Kudos to Dell. (FYI, I bought it from Best buy so I was surprised that he didn't tell me to bring it there instead. I have normal warranty that comes along with the laptop)

 

Something weird just happened to my 7000, after restarting it suddenly said "no boot device found" and no I didn't change anything.

I took the disk out and hooked it up via USB to another computer and some of the partitions are simply gone, deleted.

Downloaded a partition recovery tool and it said that there were 3 deleted partitions, not sure if I can recover them yet but I find this thing very odd.

I think someone else here had the same issue earlier in this thread.

If I need to reinstall where do I find the Windows product id?

 

Hello,
I'm planning to buy a model Dell Inspiron 7537 and I have a question about the bottom cover. Is that cover made from plastic or aluminum?

Thank you for your answer.